Apples on Table, Marsden Hartley

When I was a graduate student 50 years ago, I came across a print by Marsden Hartley in a small Minneapolis gallery. I was aware of the artist’s reputation as a painter, which in the 1960s was emerging from a long period of critical eclipse, but did not know his work as a printmaker. Alas, I hadn’t the means to buy the work, baby food and the rent taking priority, and ultimately I
left town for Kansas without it. When I arrived in my new position at the KU art museum, I discovered that the print in Minneapolis was still unsold. Fortunately, the museum did have the means, and so, for the princely sum of $150, Apples on Table became my first museum purchase.
The print was made in Paris where Hartley worked in the years following the First World War. In that art capital he was struck by the works of the moderns, particularly Georges Braque, whose still lifes of the early 1920s marked a departure from the Cubism he and Picasso had explored in the pre-war years. Hartley’s print echoes some of Braque’s still life compositions, as well as the iconic still lifes of apples by the late and revered Paul Cézanne.
Though traceable to modern French sources, Harley’s lithograph continued to puzzle me for its unfamiliarity. Research on the subject led to one of my first exhibitions at KU, featuring Hartley’s lithographs and related work. The KU publication for that show became the definitive catalogue for Hartley’s prints (a feat less imposing than it might sound as there are only 23 of them). More importantly, the interest in Hartley’s exceptional career led to new course content at KU, including a special graduate seminar on the artist’s work. Out of that came Randall R. Griffey’s prize-winning doctoral dissertation focused on the paintings of Hartley’s final years; research that later led to Griffey’s critically acclaimed Hartley exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Did it all begin with a chance encounter in a Minneapolis gallery? Of course not. But, one should never underestimate the happy role of chance encounters in art and museum life. CCE